The Feminist Hawks

How do big ideas spread on the Internet, and how are they changed in the process?

Consider the feminist-hawk position — the one that advocates the use of force to liberate Muslim women from persecution and burkas. This position has become an integral part of the ideological Web. Feminist-hawk arguments may even be considered an artifact of the Web, just the way the revolutionary arguments of 18th-century America can be seen as an artifact of pamphlets.

In the late 1990s, an e-mail petition of unclear origin began to circulate. It was called “The Taliban Is Waging a War on Women!” Styled like a chain letter, it came in several variations, each featuring reports of misogynistic crimes in Afghanistan. (“One woman was beaten to DEATH by an angry mob of fundamentalists for accidentally exposing her arm.”) If you signed, you agreed that the United Nations ought to, by “support and action,” show its intolerance for “the situation overseas.”

The petition blamed the Afghan regime and not Muslim culture for the abuses of women, and some iterations sought to pre-empt relativists who would “excuse everything on cultural grounds.” The petition typically carried a list of signatories, some with M.D.’s and Ph.D.’s, from cities like Grenoble, Cleveland and New Delhi.

Unlike Revolutionary-era pamphlets, the petition did not ground its case in political theory. Instead, it relied on the promise of global participation implicit in online communication. It made clear that a far-flung community with eyes and ears everywhere — and connections in high places — already existed. You could add your name to its moral ranks with a few keystrokes.

Today that e-mail message rarely lands in in-boxes, and when it’s cited, it’s mostly to show the oppressiveness of spam. (“The Taliban has since been removed from power,” says BreaktheChain, an anti-junk-mail site. “Too bad this chain letter can’t similarly be ‘removed.’ ”) This is a mistake. Though the petition didn’t stop the Taliban, it sounded a meaningful alarm. It also codified a polemical line that has, unexpectedly, become a war horse of hawkish bloggers.

David Horowitz, the conservative firebrand, is among those who have seized on the feminist-hawk position. Horowitz may not be an obvious feminist, but as someone who has dedicated his life to political media (producing or contributing to magazines, books, political ads, cable news, talk radio, blogs, video podcasts, even a pamphlet), he’s adroit at adapting ideologies for media platforms. Right now, this one is working for him.

Like many conservatives, Horowitz appears to have come to feminist-hawkism after 9/11. But in his hands, the ideology has fast became a tenacious memebrid — as Tim Hwang, a sociologist and the director of the Web Ecology Project, calls memes that unite two or more cultural phenomena.

“The neat marriage of hawkish tendencies and feminist framing of issues does this quite effectively,” Hwang explained to me in an e-mail message. Borrowing left-wing shibboleths is one way that “conservative ideas can make it big in a generally more liberal online social sphere,” he wrote. Furthermore, to depict Islamic regimes less as terrorists than as repressors of civil liberties may appeal even to traditional isolationists, as it “plays off of the strong communities of libertarians that dominate some prominent spaces.”

Hawkish sites that have taken up feminism include Little Green Footballs, Jihad Watch and Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine. On a recent day, the home page of the last featured reports of female prisoners being raped in Iran; prepubescent girls getting married in Gaza; and a possible honor killing by an immigrant in New York. This material is expected to help seal Horowitz’s general case for the war on terror, though he has not yet changed the name of his cause to, say, the war on misogyny.

Would the architects of the original anti-Taliban e-mail petition recognize Horowitz’s crusade as their own? Probably not. Where the original message aimed to engage the United Nations, Horowitz considers the United Nations to be “one-world kleptocrats.” And where at least one version of the chain message reproves Americans for cultural relativism, Horowitz considers his position staunchly American.

As a fan of intensely specific forms of communication — blogs, memoirs, reality TV — I don’t believe that any idea exists apart from its mode of dissemination. But I also know that ideas that seem especially big and irresistible are usually so elegantly integrated with particular communication technologies that it’s hard to conceive of them separately. Could Rush Limbaugh’s patriotic anti-elitism have coalesced anywhere but on AM radio? Could “family values” have emerged without Christian TV?

And could the feminist-hawk position have emerged without the weird confluences of the Web? Like any wily and surviving creature, this new ideology has faced evolutionary pressures and adapted to its ecological niche.

Points of Entry: This Week’s Recommendations

WEB SLEUTHS “Researching the Internet so you don’t have to,” the Web Ecology Project parses panda-sneeze vids for cultural significance. And don’t miss the other projects of Tim Hwang, including the Internet culture-celebrity conference: ROFLCon.org.

WHAT HAVE YOU GOT? David Horowitz has spent his life making ideological media. Lots of it. His memoir of how he got to be this way, “Radical Son,” is a riveting read. The site for the David Horowitz Freedom Center shows the range of his projects and the nonrange of his rhetoric (it’s all fever pitch).

WOMEN OF THE WORLD For feminist hawks, feminist doves and even nonavian feminists, EqualityNow.org is a one-stop site for the group determined to “end violence and discrimination against women and girls around the world.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page MM20 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The Feminist Hawks. Today's Paper|Subscribe